March 23, 2019 (EIRNS)—At U.S. prompting, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) yesterday canceled next week’s annual meeting which was to have been held in Chengdu, China. The ostensible reason was that China refused to grant a visa to Harvard Professor Ricardo Hausmann, recently named by Venezuela’s fake “interim” President Juan Guaidó to be its representative to the IADB.

In reality, Reuters reported, China had determined that it would invite neither Hausmann nor the representative of the Nicolas Maduro government in order to “depoliticize” the meeting. But an unnamed “senior” Trump Administration official warned that unless Hausmann were granted a visa, the U.S. and its regional allies would “pull quorum” on the meeting, making it impossible to take place. The bank said it would make a decision within 30 days as to when a meeting will be held.

In an opinion piece published yesterday in the Miami Herald and other dailies, Vice President Mike Pence sermonized that China “is undermining the hemisphere’s progress towards democracy” by refusing to grant Hausmann a visa. China’s decision to “prop up” the Maduro regime, he pontificated, is “a reminder of the threat that distant powers pose to our region’s security and prosperity.”